David Woo is the winner of the 3rd annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His first-book manuscript, <> was born and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, the son of immigrants from China. He studied English literature at Harvard College and Stanford University, and received his M. A. in Chinese studies from Yale University. His first published poem appeared in the New Yorker in 1990. His work also has been published in The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Southwest Review, The Open Boat: Poems from Asia America, and other journals and anthologies.

About The Eclipses:

"The Eclipses is a book of woe, mourning, and transcendence seldom seen in such luminous detail. David Woo is an artful rememberancer, and his approach to family and his literary ancestors has created perpetual art forms. Such allegiance provides eloquent heartwork. Or as Yeats said, 'heart-madness there.'"
—Michael S. Harper

"A brimming gorgeousness that can tip without warning into something scoured and simple."
—Kay Ryan

"Elegiac and spidery and full of the desolations of solitude . . . Intelligent first poems."
—Henri Cole

"David Woo's The Eclipses was selected by judge Michael S. Harper from over 700 manuscripts as winner of the 2003 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize contest. The artful remembrances of this first collection weave together memory, woe, mourning and, ultimately, transcendence in luminous detail. Ancestors, both literary and blood, are called forth as Woo struggles beyond his mother's death toward his own heart-intelligent truths. "David Woo's first book of poems is eloquent, poignant, superbly wrought. Like the major poet Henri Cole, Woo has achieved a fresh, highly individual imaginative language in the American modes of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. The title poem and the beautiful transposition of Hofmannsthal in 'Ballad of Infinite Forgetfulness' have an aura of permanence about them."
—Harold Bloom